Parkin Beacher Ltd – €58,500 Fine (United Kingdom, 2021)

Parkin Beacher Ltd is a direct marketing company that operates under the trading name "Your Pension Options" and "Pension Choice". Between February and September 2019, the ICO received a number of complaints from individuals who were called by the same phone number. The callers asked about them about their pensions using their first name. The company had obtained the data necessary for these calls from a third-party data supplier, who in turn obtained it from various sites. Users had agreed to these sites' Privacy Policies' which specified their information would be passed on for marketing purposes, but were not given the opportunity to select which organisations to receive marketing material from. In the time frame assessed by the ICO, Parkin Beacher Ltd made 96,817 phone calls using this data. The ICO held that Parkin Beacher Ltd contravened regulation 21B of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, which restricts calls made for the purposes of direct marketing related to pension schemes. The company was not considered an "authorised person" who can legally make such calls. The contravention was held to be "serious" due to the significant intrusion into the privacy of the recipients of these calls. It was also "deliberate" in light of the lack of due diligence carried out by the company with regards to the data it used. The ICO considered a range of aggravating features, such as the lack of cooperation on the part of the company, and issued a fine of £50,000.